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Thursday, 18 April 2013

A new report from Navigant Research maintains that while large original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have long been the leaders in the Industrial Energy Management Systems (IEMS) market, major IT companies are starting to make inroads, as are smaller players.

IEMSs are evolving quickly as industrial facilities look to become more energy efficient while still meeting production demands. What’s new is the technology, processing capabilities, software applications and business intelligence insights that vendors can now apply, much of which comes from other applications areas. While the traditional OEMs benefit from their global presence, sector knowledge and established infrastructure, the market changes have driven a need for the ability to handle large data sets and sophisticated real-time business analytics applications, which is where the IT companies have the expertise.

“The IEMS market is opening to new firms, new technologies, and unique products and services,” said Eric Woods, research director with Navigant Research. “This is good news for both clients and vendors as fresh ideas make IEMSs more accessible”.

But new market entrants will need to partner with more established IEMS players in order to be successful entry, says the report - Industrial Energy Management Systems. Those that succeed will get a share of a worldwide market for systems and services that will grow from $11.3bn in 2013 to $22.4bn in 2020. The largest market for IEMS is in North American but only slightly ahead of Europe. There’s much more in the (paid for) report.

Review: Industrial companies that use a lot of energy can make significant savings through a better understanding and management of the energy use within their facilities. That’s where IEMSs score - its the detailed knowledge and understanding of consumption that makes the difference. This is very much along the lines of, for example, data centre energy management, which has been a rapidly growing focus for IT operations in recent years, and also the emergence of Big Data, were high volumes of information need to be processed, interpreted and understood.

The interesting part is that, as with data centre infrastructure and energy management systems, there seems to be a lot of innovation which is making the solutions more accessible. It also means that potential customers can talk to their existing IT suppliers first. Ultimately, these sorts of solutions will, in any case, need to be integrated with corporate wide solutions, particularly when energy management and sustainability falls within a broad CSR remit, as is increasingly the case.